Alyx Dellamonica

Transgender Michigan was founded in 1997, and continues to run one of the only transgender helplines in the country, available 24/7 at 855-345-8464. Every tax-deductible donation helps them continue to provide support, advocacy, and education.

The winner will also receive a Tuckerization, meaning you — yes, you — will show up in the pages of Dellamonica’s next book.

About the book:

Marine videographer and biologist Sophie Hansa has spent the past few months putting her knowledge of science to use on the strange world of Stormwrack, solving seemingly impossible cases where no solution had been found before.

When a series of ships within the Fleet of Nations, the main governing body that rules a loose alliance of island nation states, are sunk by magical sabotage, Sophie is called on to find out why. While surveying the damage of the most recent wreck, she discovers a strange-looking creature—a fright, a wooden oddity born from a banished spell—causing chaos within the ship. The question is who would put this creature aboard and why?

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Winning the auction:

I’ll contact the winner, who will then donate the winning bid to Transgender Michigan. You’ll forward me a copy of the receipt, at which point, I’ll contact the donor to arrange delivery of your winnings.

About A. M. Dellamonica:

A. M Dellamonica‘s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fourth A Daughter of No Nation, has just won the Prix Aurora. She is the author of over forty short stories in a variety of genres; these can be found on Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and most recently, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She teaches writing in person at the University of Toronto and online through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Dellamonica tells people she is bigendered, bisexual and bisectional. (The latter means that she sings both soprano and alto.) She has just completed her freshman editing project, the Heiresses of Russ 2015 anthology with co-editor Steve Berman of Lethe Books.

6 Tad Williams Bundles: each bundle includes one copy of Otherland: City of Golden Shadow (hardcover first edition, first printing) plus 1 Advance Review Copy of The Heart of What Was Lost.

6 DAW December Release Bundles: each bundle includes one copy of all DAW December titles: Dreamweaver, Tempest, Alien Nation, and Jerusalem Fire, plus a bonus ARC (dependent on stock).

At any time between now and the end of the fundraiser, donate $5 to Transgender Michigan and email me a copy of the receipt at jchines -at- gmail.com, with the subject line “DAW Raffle Entry.” Each week, I’ll pick at least one donor to win their choice of either a Tad Williams or a December Release bundle from DAW.

You can donate more than $5. For example, donating $20 would get you four entries. However, you can only win a maximum of one of each bundle. This is separate from the individual auctions. Winning an auction does not count as a raffle entry.

This happened at practically the same nanosecond that marriage equality was breaking out across Canada. My partner and I had an August weekend picked out, but legalizing our marriage on the chosen day hinged on the law changing by July. If not, we’d need a Plan B… and, all along, we knew there were no guarantees. It would be wrong to say I never gave my novel any thought during that period, but it turns out that waiting to find out if your civil rights situation is going to change for the better can be somewhat all-consuming.

Then, when gay marriage did become legal in British Columbia in July of 2003, I went straight from second-guessing the Supreme Court into wedding plans.

Meanwhile, Jim Frenkel at Tor had accepted my book, pending some changes. A long back and forth began. It took awhile to finalize everything–I had 15,000 words to cut, for one thing, and there were elements of my bizarre magical world that needed more explanation. And again, life intruded–some major life challenges cropped up on my end in 2006… and 2007… and 2008. At times, the novel deal seemed unreal and far away. But contracts got signed, and money came, and my father e-mailed me every other week to ask when he could buy INDIGO SPRINGS in a Chapters. These signs of steady progress toward officially Being a Novelist gave me something to hold onto. (Now my father is in China, demanding to know when the book will be out in Mandarin.)

One of the coolest things about my first-novel journey was that Irene Gallo had spotted this amazing Julie Bell painting and liked it so much she went looking to see if any of their editors might want it for a particular project. Jim pounced on it immediately. He sent an electronic copy to me the week we finalized the deal, with a note that said something like, “If you don’t like it, we’ll get something else.” But I loved it! It is not only a beautiful painting, it’s very appropriate.

So, unlike most writers, I knew coming out of the gate that I was going to have amazing cover art. What’s more, because I did still have to tweak the novel, I had time to sync some of the details in the art with my narrative. Tiny things: my heroine, Astrid, is dolled up in the final third of the book, so it was easy to match the dress she wears with the one on the cover. There’s also a golden bowl in the painting, and by chance INDIGO SPRINGS has a ritual that features a bowl… voilà, suddenly that bowl was golden.

Writers hear cover art horror stories all the time: “They took my protagonist and made her Swedish, and also gave her an extra head!” Knowing all along that I had a stunner of an image was reassuring in its own right. Then the design team got in on the process, and Oh My! Seeing what the painting became later, when cover proofs started reaching me, was like a huge, beautiful gift from the universe.

People talk about how slow publishing is, and it’s not unusual to finish a book and then wait years to see it in bookstores. The waiting can try your patience, there’s no doubt about it. But as it happened INDIGO SPRINGS came out at a time when I was entirely ready to enjoy the launch party, the good reviews, and the book’s overall success. Prior to that time, there’d been a lot going on in my life–tough, distracting, challenging stuff!–and in retrospect it feels as though everything has unfolded at just the right pace.